Slashdot Mirror
Ozone Hole Will Heal, Say British Scientists
Therin writes: "According to the London Times, inside of 50 years the ozone hole will be healed, and it will shrink in a decade, without any further actions. Of course, a few volcanoes in there could mess up the timetable ..." The article seems a bit uncritical of claims like, "We now have the science of the ozone layer buttoned down," but it does sound like good news.
It's worth pointing out that the London Times is part of the News International empire, which has been running a sustained campaign against agreement on climate change. This is by no means the first story they've published, claiming on very shaky grounds that there's no problem.
I think what this story is saying is that Rupert Murdoch thinks that sustained, co-ordinated action on global warming would hurt his profits. I don't think it says anything meaningful about the state of the planet, the ozone hole or anything else.
People think of the London Times as a respectable newspaper because it used to be a respectable newspaper. Frankly, that was a long time ago.
(Of course this doesn't mean the ozone hole isn't healing, just that I wouldn't trust the London Times to tell me the earth was round if RM thought there was profit to be made out of a belief in a flat one)
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
T.Hobbes:
...global warming concerns energy generation, and there's no technical solution today which might solve the problem...
...and because [fusion] can produce such large amounts of electricity...
The technical solution has been well in hand for decades in the form of nuclear fission.
The solution, as far as I'm concerned, is in nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion, if it is developed, will with high certainty be significantly more expensive than fission. This creates its own environmental problems.
[Fusion is] the only power source which has little to no environmental impact...
There are no known power sources with zero environmental impact so it can't have "little to no environmental impact". It also can't be the "only power source which has little" environmental impact since the consensus of energy scientists including solar power researchers is that fission is one such power source.
What? There are power sources that don't produce large amounts of electricity? A fusion power plant is just another steam or gas turbine power plant. A fusion power plant will produce the same amount of electricity as any other steam or gas turbine. The limits are in how hot your design and your metals and your bearings and your lubricants will let you get your steam or gas, how efficient and how big and how many turbines you have, and how much water you have access to to condense your steam or gas; not how dense your heat source is.
More on fission by John McCarthy, the inventor of the LISP programming language.
Your version may be more clear and intuitive for you, but it's certainly not for those of us in the UK. It's also wrong. While The Times was traditionally based in London, there are now 3 editorial centres, in London, Liverpool and Glasgow, and the paper itself is printed at various sites throughout the UK (and abroad, too).
On a similar note, though, even News International (publishers of The Times, and my former employer) resorted to calling The Sun "The London Sun" when posting notices around Hollywood trying to find Divine Brown.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
if one were somehow to collect all the radioactive particles expelled from a coal plant over the course of a year, it would be more massive than the amount of radioactive waste produced by a fission plant.
Not only that, but the fissionable energy of the radioactive particles in coal is greater than coal's hydrocarbon energy:
ash5g:
...solar cells...
The only real way to generate electicity is to simply passively collect it eg. wind turbines...
Wind turbines require large amounts of land, pollute visually and sonically, kill birds, require large amounts of hazardous construction and maintenance labor (as opposed to nuclear fission which is relatively hazard-free) need to be located in windy places, and in the most plausible scenarios require gas turbines for back-up power when the wind isn't blowing.
(Solar cells can't provide base-load power, so they wouldn't be competing with fission or fusion, but since you brought them up...)
Solar cells require large amounts of land, pollute visually, require large amounts of hazardous construction and maintenance labor, burn 3% of their lifetime output of energy as coal when they are manufactured, and produce large amounts of chemical waste in their manufacture and decommissioning, principally but not limited to cadmium sulfide which will kill 80 people eventually per large solar power plant operation year.
BTW the burning of coal in the manufacture of solar cells is the reason solar PV plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants; i.e. the burning of coal releases radiation. It's also the reason solar PV power plants present a nuclear proliferation danger.
Perhaps you meant nuclear fission? Since no fusion power plant has ever been designed, much less built, I don't see how it can be a solution. Assuming you meant fission, I agree that it's a wonderful alternative, and actually what many people don't realize is that if one were somehow to collect all the radioactive particles expelled from a coal plant over the course of a year, it would be more massive than the amount of radioactive waste produced by a fission plant. Unfortunately, since the fission waste is concentrated, it can't be dealt with quite as easily.
I don't agree, however, that there is only one solution. Solar, hydro, wind, geothermal, fuel cell and even natural gas are all environmentally friendly sources of power, and in the end who knows which will finally have a breakthrough which could make it competitive with fossil fuel? (sooner or later, something WILL become competitive with fossil fuel, if for no other reason than eventually fossil fuels will become scarce enough that prices are driven up naturally, in the same manner that OPEC artificially keeps prices up now)
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
But this will give more ammo to people like Rush Limbaugh who think that humans can't actually damage significant portions of the ozone layer anyway and that it's all volcanoes' fault.
Volcanoes do release a lot of ozone-depleting substances into the atmosphere. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo directly caused significant ozone depletion. You can argue all you want that "natural" CFCs are water soluable, but look at what happened! Volcanic clouds were observed to have depleted ozone. This is documented fact.
Also, don't dismiss the impact of other factors (i.e. solar wind, political agendas, the Almighty Dollar) on ozone depletion, or the lack thereof.
To a certain extent, science did, at least in the beginning. It went something like this:
Science: Behold! I give to you refrigeration! Not only can you make hot climates comfortable, you can store and ship foods and medicinces like never before! Imagine what this will do for vaccination efforts!
Mankind: Pretty cool. But this ammonia refrigerant! It's nasty stuff. Can you give us something non-toxic and non-reactive?
Science: Behold! I give you CFCs! They're inert and nontoxic and make a great refrigerant. A miracle of Modern Science! Use them to make plastics! Use them in spray cans! A thousand and one uses!
Mankind: Great!
Time passes...
Science: Um, about those CFCs...we goofed. Turns out they aren't so inert when they float up into the upper atmosphere and get exposed to UV light. Bad things start to happen.
Businessman-kind: Dude, I've got a billion-dollar spraycan business going here. You said this stuff was a wonder-chemical. I'm not cutting my profits because you changed your mind.
Science: Dude, we're talking about major environmental damage here. Skin cancer for everyone. Maybe the total destruction of the ecosystem.
Businessman-kind: Sez you. You don't know that for sure.
Science: The only way to know 100% for sure is to wait a few decades and see what happens, by which time we'd be too fscked to fix anything. We're as sure as we can be at this point in time.
Businessman-kind: Well, our scientists disagree.
Science: Your scientists either suck or are paid off.
Businessman-kind: You're a bunch of pinko commies! Commies! Commies! We own this planet and we'll fsck it up if we want! It's our property and you want to take it away! Commies! Wah! Wah! (aside: They might be able to convince the government. Better start making continency plans...maybe we can even rack up some patents on CFC-free refrigerants. There may yet be profits to be had!)
Exunt all.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Cheers,
but we can't curb our consumption and waste when our lives are on the line.
Sad indeed.
--
+&x
Going to a particularly politically-correct school (which I absolutely abhor, I hear ecological arguments all the time. Get a grip, people. Humans are not creating "artificial" changes in the way the earth operates. Humans are animals, and thus natural, just like everyone else. We change our environment to suit are needs, as most animals do; and when we "create" chemicals and substances, the reality is we're just remixing what we already see. Who knows. Polyurthene may be a naturally growing tree on some other planet.
My point is, the green view is nice, but I really don't think it's necessary. Given time and a little patience, the planet is more than adequate at adjusting itself back to its center.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
You are missing the point to a stunning extent. I can't belive that this got voted up.
Natural vs. Artificial is an arbitary distinction. If we had a massive nuclear war, you could argue that it is a product of nature just as we are. But the real point is that it *would kill us all*, people, cows, bengal tigers, redwood trees and the rest. We have a choice here.
> We change our environment to suit are needs
Sometimes. Sometimes we accidentally fuck up our enviroment through ignorance and short-sighted greed. Are you seriously suggesting that the ozone hole was a deliberate change?
Who gives a flying f--- if ozone holes are natural or not. The point is that they harm us in the long term and across the whole planet. We caused them and we can stop. The green view is one that puts *our own long term good* over short-term, local gains.
> I've always argued this point, and I'm glad to see one more argument to back me up.
And how does a new calculation on the duration of ozone holes back up your "argument" that we are a part of nature?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
There are quite a lot of scientists who say that the ozone hole over antrarctica has nothing to do with CFC emissions. They claim that volcanos emit 600 times more ozone-killing chlorine into the atmosphere per year than the entire CFC production of mankind at its peak.
Ozone is created by sunlight. Sunlight is abundant near the equator where light hits the atmosphere at higher angles and that's where most of the ozone is created. Ozone coverage above the pole depends on whether there are enough jet streams to get it from the equator to the poles. The ozone heretics claim that a well-known priodic weather phenomenon over the south pole creates a pocket of air that doesn't interact much with the rest of the atmosphere and that is the real reason for the hole. This pocket is occasionally broken up by atmospheric turbulence and fresh ozone gets to the pole.
Even if the ozone heretics are correct and all the environmental scientists and world governments are deluded perhaps this is still a Good Thing: it's the first time that people realize that their actions have global consequences and that they can actually make a difference by changing their behaviour. If global warming is real (and there are enough scientists who claim it isnt...) people could point to the ozone example and show that "it worked".
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Ozone depleation is much easier to tackle than global warming; while ozone depleation is primarilty caused by a nonessential and easily replaced chemical, global warming concernes energy generation, and there's no technical solution today which might solve the problem, and without a technical solution political solutions become much more difficult to design and implement, as well as being disliked by a good number of people. The solution, as far as I'm concerned, is in nuclear fusion. It's the only power source which has litle to no environmental impact, and because it can produce such large amounts of electricity, it solves problems all the way down the chain - electrolisis to seperate hydrogen from water would become environmentally sound, making fuel cells workable, and so forth.